Fighting fire with water: Trump doesn't know how to heal, so the task falls to us

By Errol Louis

Oct 30, 2018 | 5:00 AM

Time to stop talking. (Jeff Roberson/AP Photo)

In the anguished hours Saturday, as America gradually absorbed the staggering dimensions of the horror in Pittsburgh, President Trump briefly condemned the greatest act of anti-Semitic mass murder in American history.

He also made a wisecrack to reporters about having “a bad hair day,” tweeted trivial comments about a baseball game and spoke at a campaign rally that included personal insults hurled at political opponents and a racist taunt of Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

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Patti Davis, the daughter of Ronald Reagan, stated plainly what New Yorkers already knew about the current occupant of the White House.

“This President will never offer comfort, compassion or empathy to a grieving nation. It’s not in him,” Davis wrote in the Washington Post. “When questioned after a tragedy, he will always be glib and inappropriate. So I have a wild suggestion: Let’s stop asking him. His words are only salt in our wounds.”

Point well taken. A group of Jewish leaders from Pittsburgh published a letter asking Trump not to visit the site of the massacre, citing the President’s political coddling of far-right nationalists and his equivocation last year when Nazis openly marched in Charlottesville chanting “Jews will not replace us!”

New Yorkers know better than anybody that Donald Trump of Jamaica Estates, with his long public career of bluster, bombast, bullying and bull, is not the healer America needs in this moment of crisis. That task falls to each of us.

I called my friend Michael Miller, CEO of the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York, for advice.

“We all essentially have to become engineers and build bridges,” Miller told me. “It could be a spiritual engineer, a communal engineer, a political engineer. But we need to be in the bridge-building business.”

Miller and his staff do it full-time, and have woven a web of relationships over the years, sponsoring countless dinners, discussions, celebrations and trips to Israel and the West Bank. This moment is a stress-test of those human bonds.

Next weekend, my family and I will be in a Manhattan synagogue for the bar mitzvah of one of my son’s classmates. I urge my fellow New Yorkers to create, discover or renew these kinds of connections.

Small gestures may be both the least and the most we can do right now. As a way to flip the bird at the racists, I made a donation to HIAS, the refugee-resettlement charity that reportedly enraged the suspect in the Pittsburgh massacre; you can do the same at hias.org.

I also talked with Eric Adams, the Brooklyn Borough president, whose response to the massacre was to publicly call for off-duty cops to carry their weapons into houses of worship.

“This is not a new conversation,” Adams told me; he’s been talking with religious leaders about safety for years “Churches, synagogues, mosques were off limits to even the most sick people among us. But look at these last cases. They’re starting to hit these soft targets — and I hate to even say this, but the reality is, it's not going to stop.”

But isn’t that a surrender to evil, I asked him. Aren’t we supposed to be putting our faith in God rather than a Glock?

“I view everything through the prism of public safety first. Innocent people should not be victimized,” he said.

Adams’ heart is in the right place. But I side more with Miller, who says: “In my synagogue, we have volunteers — unarmed volunteers — who stand outside of the synagogue in the cold, in the rain. We live in a crazy world. But fight fire with fire? That's ridiculous. We fight fire by putting out the fire.”